Upkurve blog

Authentic living

I’m James Nicholls and these are the some principles I’ve picked up along the journey of life:

1. Strive to increase your awareness of and connection to wholeness (some like to call it God)2. Strive to actualise the presence of love (altruism) in one to one relations. To serve and add value to your partner, child, stranger, friend etc. 3. Know thyself. Strive to increase your self-awareness. (Interiors: psychologically, consciousness-wise etc and exteriors: brain states, neuro-endocrinal system, body)4. In group relations, strive to increase justice in the world (the flourishing of love), and create social cohesion. 5. Increase awareness of reality (Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. E.g. the Cosmos, your consciousness, a cell, the moon, culture, money systems, human nature etc)

I consciously started to apply these principles around 20 years ago. Certain periods I was acutely aware of them and other periods I was not. When I did apply them, I was very happy, filled up with life. And those periods I didn’t I was superficially happy but not fulfilled, joyful and alive. The overall system was to think about it in the mornings and evenings. Like a goal setting and evaluation method.

My aim is to apply these principles on my own terms and be able to give more focused attention to them, for example I want to be able to spend a lot more quality time with my kids, I want to do more projects in Africa of my own design.

What about the cash?

The way I am looking to take it to a higher level, is via liberating myself from the 9-5 hustle, not exchanging time for money but leveraging the internet and a global market. There are multiple ways of doing that. One of them is through Affiliate Marketing. The concept is to create income from commissioned based sales. There are products that have a low ticket commissions and others that have high ticket commission surpassing $9K. The idea is to build your online business to such an extent that you can be getting residual income and high profits 24/7. The trouble is people who do it fully end up making loads of cash and have free time but are unfulfilled and pursuing surface level gains. My goal is to free-up my time more so I can do meaningful activities in the world like engaging those principles mentioned above. See more about affiliate marketing (including ($9K commissions) by clicking here…

Please do contact me on the principles I’ve raised and if I can help in any way to elaborate, I will.

The ballooned internet technology has already been tested in New Zealand, California (US), Brazil and since January 2016, India. If this technology could be utilised in Afghanistan, it would bypass security issues such as insurgency attacks during internet infrastructure rollouts.

The challenge with development is that implementing agencies don’t like to report failures to donors and failures are absolutely necessary to the iterative process at the heart of development. Often, they only want to report positive results to please donors who in turn want to show taxpayers of respective countries how the money is being well spent.

According to IBM, big data technologies have a major role to play in Africa’s development challenges: from understanding food price patterns, to estimating GDP and poverty numbers, to anticipating disease — the key is turning data into knowledge and actionable insight. See the IMB press release here.

A couple of months back we interviewed the Vice President of Nigeria and produced the following film on Zero Based Budgeting - a new reform put into place to change national budgeting practices for the good...

If you take 30 steps linearly you will move roughly 30 meters. However, if you take 30 steps exponentially, you get to a billion meters! Computers have been improving in price-performance at an exponential rate for the last 45 years.

Official secrets and corruption were proclaimed to to be a thing of the past with the enactment of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, which ensures right of access to public records and information for all individuals. Individuals now have the right to request public records and information, and institutions be more transparent in their functioning and business.

If we have a sense of the deep past, we can imagine all sorts of possible futures, far flung and immediate. That’s partly why I love big history, the epic of evolution/the great story on the one hand, and futurism, sci-fi, religious visions of the future on the other.

David Christian talks about collective learning in his lecture series titled ‘Big History’. He posits that the thing that made humans survive and prosper was their ability to use symbolic language to learn collectively. This collective learning would survive the death of peoples and move onto the next generation passing the technological and spiritual gains into the future.

Life, business and reality in general can be likened to a house that continues to expand as you open doors. You are an explorer and architect probing the strange edge of what is possible in a magic house of automated extensions; a mansion of your own making.